"Being able to write an idea down succinctly doesn't make that idea any better than one which rambles on a bit. It just comes to the point sooner"
About this Quote
Succinctness is often treated like a moral virtue, a sign of intelligence, even a proxy for truth. Simon Travaglia punctures that piety with a dry, programmer-adjacent realism: compression is a delivery format, not a quality guarantee. The line works because it refuses the TED Talk myth that a clean one-liner means the thinking behind it is clean.
The intent is corrective. Travaglia isn’t defending bad writing; he’s calling out a lazy form of aesthetic judgment where we praise brevity the way we praise minimalism in design, assuming the stripped-down surface must hide a superior engine. The subtext is a jab at status games: in many workplaces and online spaces, the concise speaker wins the room, not because they’re right, but because they’ve made it easier to nod along. “It just comes to the point sooner” is the quiet tell: speed is the advantage, not depth.
Context matters here because Travaglia’s name is closely associated with tech culture, where “succinct” is practically a sacred adjective. Think of code golf, pithy commit messages, sloganized best practices, and hot takes that travel faster than nuance. His claim nudges us to separate efficiency from understanding. Some ideas genuinely require sprawl: caveats, edge cases, the messy scaffolding of how you know what you think.
There’s also a humane implication: rambling can be the sound of a mind working in public. Sometimes the longer explanation isn’t worse; it’s just honest about complexity.
The intent is corrective. Travaglia isn’t defending bad writing; he’s calling out a lazy form of aesthetic judgment where we praise brevity the way we praise minimalism in design, assuming the stripped-down surface must hide a superior engine. The subtext is a jab at status games: in many workplaces and online spaces, the concise speaker wins the room, not because they’re right, but because they’ve made it easier to nod along. “It just comes to the point sooner” is the quiet tell: speed is the advantage, not depth.
Context matters here because Travaglia’s name is closely associated with tech culture, where “succinct” is practically a sacred adjective. Think of code golf, pithy commit messages, sloganized best practices, and hot takes that travel faster than nuance. His claim nudges us to separate efficiency from understanding. Some ideas genuinely require sprawl: caveats, edge cases, the messy scaffolding of how you know what you think.
There’s also a humane implication: rambling can be the sound of a mind working in public. Sometimes the longer explanation isn’t worse; it’s just honest about complexity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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